Women admitting they can't Have It All are becoming as much of a middle-class cliché as the Bugaboo in the back of the Jeep, but who could have predicted the speed at which it would happen?

While all working mothers live with their "failure" to be both the "perfect" employee and parent on a daily basis (and try to sleep it off on Sundays), others may only admit to a perceived "failure" (it isn't) with guilt (it's always with guilt) as they hand in their notice and the seductive mirage of infinite quality time with their offspring shimmers on the horizon, while yet more may only do so a few years down the line when, having Just Said No to high-flying professional careers, they feel they've sold themselves short even as they construct a scale Tate Modern for the toddler out of Play-Doh.

So for every woman fulfilled by her brave choice not to work – brave because she may have been defined if not by her career then by the fact she is still among comparatively few women in the world given the chance to have one – there will be other women "failing" to fit the hard edges of their square-peg selves into the doughnut-shaped hole of domesticity.

The choice of whether or not to give up work is a no-brainer for professional women like myself who are single parents and/or main breadwinners and don't fancy living on benefits, but there's no point in us envying those who do have a choice. Hell, even if I had ever met and married a man with both the inclination and wherewithal to keep me in the manner to which I once dreamed of becoming accustomed, I couldn't have predicted how it would turn out, though the shape of a pear did just leap into my mind's eye, funnily enough.

But I'm very fortunate, because in some respects it's easier to be spared the choice. For those women rushing daily to an office, having just handed kids over to The Help, an opportunity to work at home as I do (plus navigate school runs/after-school activities/homework/cooking/washing/bedtime stories/discipline/blah mostly on my own, except for those days when the boys are with their father) before collapsing with a glass of wine in front of The X Factor probably looks like living the dream, even though we're level-pegging on both the exhaustion and the guilt.

But even as smart working mothers are learning, slowly, that there is no dream, there is a semi-secret checklist of rarely articulated truths-cum-nightmares:

1) Unless you are able to strap the baby on to your back, working motherhood is a series of debilitating compromises, either financially or emotionally…

2) …And emotional compromise is worse.

3) A single child is (sort of) manageable alongside a career, but a second child is not simply twice the work of one but, confusingly, about three times as much – even allowing for the fact that you'll be much better at it.

4) And nobody tells you that.

5) And though it's possible to muddle through a sinking-ship relationship with one child, a second (never mind more) may be the iceberg in the Atlantic. And nobody tells you that either.

And if I sound bitter and cynical, believe me, I'm not – I'm currently about as close to my own version of Having It All as I'll ever be, if only because I know I never shall.

But here's the good news: there's a great deal less to life than Having It All (a phrase I'd like to see consigned to the recycling bin of post-feminist "herstory" by the stroke of midnight on 31 December). By which I mean that instead of fetishising the glossy-magazine-style props of a "lifestyle" – complete with alpha husband, nice house and car and cute Boden-clad, 11-plus-passing kids – the proof of a life well lived, of Having Had as much of the mythical All as any of us deserves, will almost certainly be internal, invisible to anybody other than ourselves.

Not, you understand, that a rich interior life need ever stand in the way of appreciating a new pair of Loubs. And if you can't afford them yourself but are fortunate enough to have a partner in your life who can and happily will afford them on your behalf, then I'd hate to think you felt guilty about that, too…★